We are proud to announce that Ernesto Priego, one of our UCLDH PhD students who has just submitted his thesis will be giving a seminar on Comic Book Markup Language: Challenges and Opportunities on Thursday 13 January in room G32 of Senate House at 5.30. Ernesto is passionate about comics, their phenomenology, and their new existence on the web and mobile platforms and this promises to be a very enjoyable talk as a result. Do join us if you can.

Harvey Pekar, an American writer of nonfiction comics, died on Monday July 12, 2010, aged 70. Pekar achieved fame with his American Splendor comics series, which he started in 1975.

In spite of his faith in the collaborative storytelling power of comic books, Pekar was not afraid of trying out other channels of expression, including television, the opera and the web. He remained critical of American corporate culture until the end.

Organised and curated by Dr David Huxley and Dr Joan Ormond, researchers of the Manchester Metropolitan University Visual Culture Research Centre, the Manchester conference will host keynote lectures by some of the most prolific comics scholars in the UK (Paul Gravett, Roger Sabin, Mel Gibson and Martin Barker), as well as eight panels covering the subject areas of genre, gender, culture, national identity, adaptation, ideology, history and form. It is within this last bracket that I will participate.

My paper seeks to discuss how materiality plays/played a key role in the phenomenology of comic books and graphic novels, and therefore in understanding what is at stake in the migration from the printed page to the digital screen. In days when the “dematerialisation” of “creative content” is so pervasive, it is important to focus more emphatically on the materiality of the printed comic book as a process of construction of meaning.

The challenges of contemporary comics scholarship and comics conferences are several. In spite of their apparent ubiquity in the mainstream cultural landscape, comic books are the object of a widespread prejudice that has two main expressions. One is the debatable disqualification of any text perceived as addressed or appealing to children as lacking in “seriousness;” the second is a pervasive iconophobia that still has very actual manifestations today.

For comics scholars the challenge remains in establishing a critical distance from their object of study. Nevertheless, as Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse discuss in their introduction to Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, it cannot be denied that often the academic study of popular culture shares productive and creative spaces with “fan culture” and is the result of “the meeting of two worlds” (2006). This does not deny the fact that serious critical inquiry of cultural products requires both a passionate approach to the subject matter and an almost heartless, cold-blooded ability to dissect it.

Bart Beaty (University of Calgary) wrote that comics, as “a maligned and ignored medium of communication” tends to be “bolstered by those that are interested in the form” (2004). In reaction to this widespread tendency Beaty argues that if “comics studies” are to be taken seriously as a scholarly field, “the medium [of comics] needs to be promoted by its detractors.” According to Beaty, beyond the mere “celebration” of the form, what would make comics scholarship reach “maturity” would be proper scholarly interrogation; “to bring to light submerged insights into culture generally that the specific form of comics illuminate.”

I am hopeful the Manchester conference will offer both an excellent opportunity to evaluate the state of international comics scholarship and to prove that a love for comics is not opposed to their critical scholarly interrogation.